The setting is Belorussia, 1943. WWII is in full swing, German Nazis have occupied the area, and Flyora has joined the Belarusian resistance movement. \u201cEverybody\u2019s going. I must <\/em>go,\u201d he tells his mother. \u201cI won\u2019t let you go! I won\u2019t!\u201d she insists, but there\u2019s no talking him out of it. He\u2019s enchanted by the idea, and by the military men who come to transport him; he thinks he\u2019s going off to play soldier. But their antics make his little sisters cry, and that should tell him something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe new recruit\u201d soon finds that there\u2019s nothing fun or exciting about war; it\u2019s terrifying and upsetting, and no sooner has he arrived than he\u2019s left behind, his boots deemed more valuable than his service. Like any person this young might, he cries, helpless and hurt, and in the remnants of their resistance camp, he finds a (brief) companion, and narrowly dodges an air strike, losing part of his hearing in the process. They escape, and it becomes a strange kind of survivalist adventure, with Flyora and friend wandering an abandoned countryside. And then the Nazis find him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The acts of casual brutality and sneering intimidation that Flyora both witnesses and is subjected to as their captive are horrifying, and Aleksei Rodionov\u2019s camera does not blink. Though there are moments of stunning beauty here (including a handful of gasp-inducing split diopter shots), Rodionov and Klimov are more concerned with using the camera to capture the experience, via flashes of nightmare imagery and carefully composed, subjective close-ups, tight and involving. (An unexpected hard cut, late in the film, to archival newsreel footage is also devastating.) The immersive sound design further pushes us into Flyora\u2019s wrecked headspace; one moment in particular sticks in this viewer\u2019s mind, with flames, gunfire, music and screams, horrible screams, battling for bandwidth on the soundtrack. It\u2019s unshakable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But for all of the picture\u2019s technical triumphs, Klimov\u2019s most effective tool is the expressive face of Aleksei Kravchenko, the young actor who plays Flyora. It\u2019s a wide, open face, and that\u2019s key, because as he registers the aggressions and atrocities around him, he becomes something of an audience surrogate. The work Kravchenko is doing here isn\u2019t subtle; he may as well be in a silent movie, and this is meant as a compliment. Sometimes you have to go that broad, that operatic, to convey the depth of this terror. Klimov famously shot the picture chronologically, over nine grueling months, and as a result, it genuinely feels as though Kravchenko has been through an ordeal; throughout these 143 minutes, we watch the innocence of the early scenes fade from that face. It hardens, into a pained, then terrified, then furious grimace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout Come and See<\/em>, the presence of death is barely more upsetting than the abruptness of it; violence just breaks out, over no sooner than it\u2019s begun, emanating from anywhere, and not a single voice objects. This is perhaps what\u2019s most unnerving about watching the film now, as new strains of fascism arise all but unabated. In perhaps the film\u2019s most horrifying sequences, the Nazi soldiers board up a church with villagers (including women and children) locked inside; the church is torched, killing them all. As the building lights up, the observing crowd of soldiers breaks into cheers and applause. Mass murder and domestic terror are, for these monsters, a spectator sport. And that aspect of the film hasn\u2019t dated one bit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCome and See\u201d is <\/em>out now on Blu-ray<\/em><\/a> from the Criterion Collection, and is <\/em>streaming on the Criterion Channel<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWhat do you think you are doing?\u201d yells the village elder, to the boys he cannot see. \u201cPlaying a game? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":14367,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399,1381],"tags":[1431,1422,162],"class_list":["post-14364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","category-movies","tag-classic-corner","tag-looking-back","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14364"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22792,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14364\/revisions\/22792"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/comeandsee2-1024x768.jpeg\")
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